There is a peculiar modern habit of treating “knowledge” and “understanding” as synonyms, filing them both under the same bureaucratic heading: Information We Have Acquired
The mistake organisations make is assuming the machinery that generates understanding and the machinery that generates knowledge are the same machinery, just at different scales. So they build enormous, well-resourced, rigorously-run knowledge engines — research departments, innovation labs, insight teams with quarterly OKRs — and then wonder, plaintively, why breakthroughs keep happening somewhere else, usually in somebody’s garage, or in a country nobody was watching, or in a business unit so small nobody bothered to hold a meeting about it.
Here is the uncomfortable bit. Teams are magnificent at knowledge. They are, on the whole, hopeless at understanding — How Understanding is born ? it is born out of failure – infact many attempts to find relationships between un-related ideas/concepts suddenly understanding presents itself. Teams are always hesitant to move towards relating the unrelated , Teams are made to perform to generate guilt if there is no activity .
Teams are indispensable for the unglamorous, essential work of turning one person’s private, half-formed, unreliable understanding into something a thousand other people can use without having the original insight themselves. That transformation — understanding into knowledge — is arguably harder than the original spark, and it is where most of the actual value gets created. The lightbulb moment is cheap. The grid that delivers electricity to everyone else is not.
But the two processes want different conditions.
Understanding wants slack, solitude, permission to look foolish, and a very high tolerance for the unfalsifiable hunch.
Knowledge wants process, documentation, checking, and scale.
If you run both through the same machine — the weekly meeting, the shared deck, the consensus sign-off — you will get plenty of the second and almost none of the first, and you will never quite know why.
Companies speak of Innovation , unluckily innovation can not be assembled but luckily enough an atmosphere can be created to make Innovation happen .